All right, well good morning! It's good to see you here today. Don't kids just say things so much better than we could ever say them sometimes? I'm so thankful that God has planted me in a church that puts others above themselves, who are generous, who are loving. We take something like Black History Month and put it at the forefront so that we don't repeat history. It's good for us to be educated on what has happened in our history so that we don't repeat it, right?
And then at the end of the month, we're going to celebrate International Sunday, where we can celebrate all walks of life, all cultures. I'm just so thankful because, look around, this is what heaven's going to look like. Our God is a creator God, and He is a God of diversity. It's going to look like this when we get to heaven, so I'm so excited about that. Are you excited about that?
There's not a whole lot of seats in this place. I need you to get excited because that is awesome! I mean, you're only one service; the first service has even fewer seats. I'm so excited about the growth that the Father's House is going through. We've been steadily growing for quite some time now. I mean, even through COVID, we grew here at the Father's House.
So Pastor Terry has announced that on Easter Sunday, because we want to be prepared for every person that God is going to send here to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we're going to add a third service on Easter morning. We're going to have a 7:30 service, a 9:00, and an 11:00. So we'll have three opportunities to hear the Word, and you'll have three different times that you can invite people to come and hear the Gospel. Isn't that exciting? Isn't it exciting that God is bringing so many people to the Father's House? We're going to be good stewards of those people.
Did you bring your Bible today? If you didn't bring your Bible, maybe you have it on your phone or your iPad. Wherever you've got it, let's hold it up and let's say this confession. We don't say this just to say it; we say it so that we can get ourselves in the right frame of mind to hear from the Word of God.
All right, let's all say it together:
"This is my Bible. It is the Word of God. It is life to me. Today I receive the Word. I confess my mind is alert, my heart is receptive, I am obedient, and I will never be the same again in Jesus's name. Amen."
Father, we are here to hear from You. That's the purpose of why we came to this place today. We want to grow in the things of You. We want to learn more about You and who You say that we are. Father, these words are just words without You that have been put into a machine, and Father, I pray Your anointing over this machine, over the words that are going to be spoken today. Father, let us have ears to hear, and not just to hear, but that we would do something about it. We just thank You for everything that You've already done in this place. In Jesus's name, and all God's people said, "Amen."
Amen! Well, we've been in a series called Extreme Makeover. First, in January, it was Extreme Makeover: Internal Edition, and then Extreme Makeover this month is Relationships Edition. We just started Season Two last week, but if you've missed any of them, I encourage you to go back to thefathershouse.com and check the archives to get caught up. You're not going to be sad that you did that.
Before I keep moving on, though, I have to get this out of the way because you don't know this, but I have a second job. After I teach here, I'm going to get on a plane and fly to Vegas because I'm reffing the game tonight, representing our Chiefs. Yep!
So I was going to say something, but sir, you have a 49er shirt on. You're pretty big, and I'm afraid that you're going to tackle me, so I'm not going to start talking trash about the game tonight. We'll just leave it at that. I'm going to ref the game, okay?
I had to tell you something funny because it's getting ready to get deep and hard, so we need to laugh some when that happens. I'm going to tell you that what you're going to hear today will be easy to sit here and listen to, but it will be hard to walk it out because today we're going to talk about the "F" word.
Right? Some of you just woke up. You weren't paying attention. You're like, "Did she really just say that?" Yes, we're going to talk about the word forgiveness. Thank you for those of you who engaged online on Facebook. The question that was put out is, "How hard is it for you to forgive on a scale from 1 to 10, one being the easiest, ten being the hardest?"
I saw some recurring answers. One was, "Depends." It depends on the situation, severity, how many times the offense has occurred. A lot of you said it's not easy to forgive myself, and I’ve got to be honest, I can fall in that category as well. We tend to be very critical of ourselves, don't we?
But this week, I heard the Holy Spirit say, when I was sort of wrestling with that, I heard the Holy Spirit say, "Are your standards higher than Mine?" And I thought, "No, not even close." So we've got to ask God in those situations where we're feeling like we are struggling to forgive ourselves, we've got to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to us what's going on underneath the surface. Is there a lie that you or I have believed that is causing us to get stuck in that unforgiveness of ourselves, not being able to let it go?
So let's talk today, first of all, about what forgiveness is and what it isn't. I want to talk first about what it isn't. You'll see on your notes there, if you grabbed one of those pieces of paper on your way in, you'll see on there or on the screen that forgiveness is not justifying someone's actions. Just because you forgive doesn't mean that you justify what they've done.
It's not letting them off the hook. It's not a guarantee of reconciliation because what I know about reconciliation is it takes two people to be reconciled. And then that leads into, it's not a guarantee that we'll do life together. I added a fifth one, and I want you to write this one down: forgiving is not necessarily forgetting.
It's not necessarily forgetting. See, it depends on how you're defining forgetting because we can't selectively delete events from our life. If we completely had no recollection about every single wrong done to us, how would we know what boundaries to put in place? That's not really a healthy way to live within the context of relationships.
See, the forgetting part of forgiving looks more like not becoming a slave to the past, not getting stuck in the hurt, and being able to move forward because forgiveness is about freedom. Forgiveness is about freedom. Forgiveness is a way of life.
Matthew 18 says this: "Then Peter came to Him and said, 'Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?'" I want to stop right there in the middle of that because what Peter is doing is he would have known that the rabbis taught that after three times of an offense, wash your hands of the person, and you're done. So he's thinking, "Well, I'll double it plus one, and I'll get a pat on the back there."
I'm going to say, "Oh, how much is it? Seven times?" Jesus says, "No, I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven." Now, Jesus is not suggesting here that we take this as a mathematical equation, okay? Some of you have read that and you're thinking to yourself, "70 times 7, that's 490, so 491, I'm good, I'm done." That's not what He's saying.
I mean, He's talking about one person sinning against you 70 times 7 in one day, and that's only one person. One person, and it's the same thing over and over and over again. I don't know that someone has done 70 times 7 to me over and over and over again in one day. No, what He's saying is, "Peter, here, not on the fourth time, not on the eighth time, not on the 491st time, but it's a way of life."
Forgiveness should flow out of you. So why should we forgive? So glad you asked! Well, God said to. Really, we could just pack up right here with that one statement, and we could go home and live it out because God said to. If only we could live with more of an attitude of, "If God said it, do it."
We don't always have to know why. We don't always have to understand it; we just need to be willing to obey Him. Those of us parents know what I'm talking about. Those of us that are parents in the room, grandparents, you know what I'm talking about. Your kid comes to you, and they're like, "Why? But why? But why do I have to do that? But why?" And what do you say to them in response? "Because I said so."
Just trust me and do it because I said so. God's the same way with us. He doesn't have to explain Himself all the time; He just wants us to trust Him because He's good, because He's wise, because He's all-loving, and everything He asks us to do or how He tells us we should live our lives is for my benefit and for your benefit.
Ephesians 4 says, "Let all bitterness and indignation and wrath, passion, rage, bad temper, and resentment, anger, animosity, and quarreling, brawling, clamor, contention, and slander, evil speaking, abusive or blasphemous language be banished from you with all malice, spite, ill will, or baseness of any kind, and become useful and helpful and kind to one another, tenderhearted, compassionate, understanding, loving-hearted, forgiving one another."
And here it is: "readily and freely." It's a flow; it's a way of life, as God in Christ forgave you. I don't think it's a mistake that bitterness comes first in this passage because bitterness can be directly traced to the failure to forgive. It makes you caustic, sarcastic, condemning, and downright nasty at times, harassed by the memories of what you can't forgive. Your thoughts become malignant towards others, and your whole view of life becomes distorted.
Here's a great quote by Benjamin Franklin: "Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble." Isn't that good? Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble.
The second reason we should forgive is because your faith won't work if you don't. Galatians 5:6 says, "For if we are in Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith activated and energized and expressed and working through love." See, faith can only work through love.
I can't go to God with a heart full of anger and bitterness and all kinds of ugly things down in there and expect my faith to have any power. But if I go to Him walking in love and ask Him to do things for me, then He can hear and answer those prayers. If we're living in unforgiveness, essentially, we're living void of love.
If we're living in unforgiveness, essentially, we're living void of love. And if there is no love, how can faith be activated, energized, and expressed? Are you following with what I'm saying? Are you getting this?
So some of you thought that you came to a cooking class today, and you didn't. These potatoes are kind of like what could be represented as offenses. Can I tell you that the moment you opened up your eyes and woke up this morning, offense was coming for you? Every day, offense is coming for you. It's inevitable. The question is, what are you going to do when those offenses come?
Inevitably, you're going to have a conversation with your spouse, and your spouse is going to say something not what you would want to hear, and that could be an offense, right? You're going to drive in The Villages at some point. Sorry, Villagers, I feel like we pick on you. I actually live just north of The Villages, so I can speak to this because I drive it every day.
But you're going to drive in The Villages or wherever you're going to drive, and someone's going to cut you off. Somebody is going to roll down their window and scream expletives at you. They're going to scream stuff at you; they're going to use some hand gestures, and you have the opportunity, you have the choice to take that as an offense.
You're going to go to work, and you've got these people called co-workers. You might have come up with the most brilliant idea ever. You're coming in to present it to your boss, but you told your coworker the other day, and they got there before you did, and they told it, and they got the brilliant gold star for the day, and they actually got the promotion.
Offense! Ten years ago, your spouse cheated on you, left you with the kids, with a mortgage, car payments, and just said, "I'm out. I don't love you anymore." An offense that you can take on. Back in high school, your best friend said some nasty stuff about you, spread some rumors, and you're still holding on to that offense from all those years ago.
Maybe at one point, you made a decision to have an abortion, and you can't forgive yourself. And into the bag an offense goes. All of these offenses that we can accumulate all day long, they're coming.
Are you filling up your bag, or are you letting them go? Because if you're not letting them go, this is what you look like: you're carrying around a bag of offenses. Now, this bag isn't too heavy right now; it's not that I can't carry it. But if I continue to carry this the entire time I taught, all day today, all into the night before I went to bed, then I put it down, I would get tired.
This is not energizing to me. Not only that, at some point, these potatoes are going to begin to rot. The longer they stay in this bag, the quicker they're going to begin to rot. And have you ever smelled rotted potatoes? I'm going to cause every single one of y'all to go home and look in the pantry and make sure that your potatoes are not rotten.
Did you know that when I was researching for this and I was looking up about potatoes rotting, it's funny when you're preparing for teaching the things that you will find and come up against. I did not know this; maybe some of you do. I didn't know, but when a potato rots at a certain point, it will begin to give off a gas. It's a really long word, and I can't pronounce it, so I'm not even going to attempt it.
But it will produce this kind of gas that's toxic to people and, in large amounts, can be fatal. So if you're carrying around a bag for 5, 10, 12, 65 years, how stinky and rotten is your bag?
And how many relationships have gone to the wayside because of it? We've got to get rid of that sack of potatoes. On top of that, I don't want to open the door for Satan to work in my life.
Come on! Paul wrote to the Corinthians and said, "Forgive in order that Satan might not outwit you, for we are not aware of his schemes." Forgive so that you give the devil no opportunity into your life. Ephesians 4:26 says, "Be angry at sin, at immorality, at injustice, at ungodly behavior, yet do not sin. Do not let your anger cause you shame, nor allow it to last until the sun goes down, and do not give the devil an opportunity to lead you into sin by holding a grudge or nurturing anger or harboring resentment or cultivating bitterness."
I think we have swung the pendulum too far on the emotional side of that. We think that in order to be a Christian and to be godly, we can't ever experience anger. Okay, come on! God gave us emotion. Do you think that when you read in your Bible when Jesus went into the temple and He flipped the tables, do you think that He was singing a happy song and dancing around? He was angry!
He was angry! But He did not sin in His anger. So how can I be angry and not sin? Well, here's the key: just because you feel angry doesn't mean you can't control it. You can say to God, "I feel so angry about this, but I'm choosing to let it go."
Now, that doesn't mean that your feelings will change right away. In fact, they may not change for quite some time. But if you choose to do what God tells you to do, your feelings will always catch up with your choice.
Listen to me: they will always catch up with your choice. If they haven't caught up with your choice, you need to stick it out because eventually, your feelings will catch up with your choice. Why? Because every time I choose to do it God's way, He's changing me more and more and more and more into and conforming me to His likeness, His ways.
What He says, you maybe can't help what you feel, but you can choose what to do, right? Verse 26 says, "Don't let the sun go down on your anger." You know why? Because whatever you go to bed with is what you're going to wake up with. Don't give the devil any kind of a foothold.
Proverbs 14:30 says, "A calm and undisturbed mind and heart are the life and health of the body, but envy, jealousy, and wrath, or anger, are like rottenness of the bones." Those rotten potatoes! When we look at that, who wants that? Do you want that? I don't want that.
Now, I can stay angry if I want to. I can even go so far as to hate someone for the rest of my life if I want to, but I don't have to if I don't want to either. See, what you need to know right now, I really believe that the enemy has lied to many of you, is you don't have to be chained to what that person said. You don't have to be chained to the hurt that was done to you. You don't have to be chained to the past. You can choose to let it go.
Letting it go doesn't get them off the hook. God will deal with them, okay? All right? Letting it go doesn't mean that there's going to be a guarantee that we're going to do life together. Remember, we talked about that. It's not justifying their actions.
Every time we choose to do what's right according to His truth, He will always help us do it. So you're not doing it; you're not out there somewhere doing this by yourself. Maybe you are. Let me tell you today, there's someone who wants to walk alongside you. Not only walk alongside you, He wants to walk in front of you. He wants to walk behind you, and even sometimes, He wants to carry you.
Another reason we should forgive is because unforgiveness grieves the Holy Spirit. As a believer, the Holy Spirit lives inside you, and He is so precious and so wonderful. He's our comforter, He's our helper, He's our teacher, He's our guide. He deals with us in such a gentle way, and we should not grieve Him.
Ephesians 4 says, "And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, but seek to please Him by whom you are sealed and marked, branded as God's own for the day of redemption, the final deliverance from the consequences of sin."
So here it is again: "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor, perpetual animosity, resentment, strife, fault-finding, and slander be put away from you, along with every kind of malice, all spitefulness, verbal abuse, malevolence."
Did you know that also unforgiveness will hinder your worship? In Matthew 5, the message says it like this: "This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering. Leave immediately. Go to this friend and make things right. Right then and only then come back and work things out with God."
Now, this has taken it to a whole other level because Jesus is saying if you are aware someone else is upset with you, it's your responsibility to go to them and make it right.
So let me ask you this: could that possibly mean that maybe even though it might have been their fault, that as followers of Christ, He's in fact saying we should still go and humble ourselves and say, "I want to make peace"? God forgives, and we need to learn how to forgive also, and we need to do it quickly.
Anything that God tells us to do, we can because He gives us grace, which is the power and the ability to do it. So it really isn't a matter of "I can't." It's not a matter of you can't today, but that we refuse to.
So here are three practical steps to living a life of forgiveness. The first step that we have to do is we have to decide to forgive. We have to decide to forgive. Just like when I was talking about the potatoes, that offense is coming for you today. If it hasn't happened yet, when you walk out those doors, offense is coming.
At some point, you will have the opportunity to be offended today before the sun goes down. But you have to decide to forgive. Something that I have learned in my own life is that when you have to make those big decisions, those what could be life-altering decisions, they can't be made in the heat of the moment.
Because oftentimes, in the heat of the moment, we'll go with what we feel. We won't go with what's right. We won't go with what God says. We'll go with what we feel; we'll go with the flesh. We'll go with what makes us feel better about ourselves or about the situation.
So we've got to pre-decide. Are you going to just live the rest of the day just by chance that if you become offended? Who knows what the offense is going to be, right? Who knows if tonight a family member of yours will be killed in a car accident because of a drunk driver? That's more of a severe situation that I'm called to give forgiveness to. You don't know.
So instead, let's choose when we get up in the morning as part of starting our day with God and say, "God, I choose today, this day today, and I'm going to choose it again tomorrow. But today, right now, I'm going to choose to live unoffended. I'm going to choose to forgive."
Now, don't start there; don't stop there because you're going to walk out of your house, and without calling on the Holy Spirit for help, you're going to fail. Yeah, we've got to ask the Holy Spirit. We've got to invite Him into every aspect of our life all day long.
So you made a pre-decision. Here comes that coworker that you can't stand. Under your breath, "Holy Spirit, help me! I said that I chose to live unoffended today. I chose; I'm choosing forgiveness today."
Forgiveness is not a feeling; forgiveness is an action, and it begins with a decision. That first step is to decide. Thank God we have free will! I know sometimes we don't like free will. We would like for God to just tell us what to do and make us do it because it would be a lot easier.
But He gave us this gift of free will. He trusted us enough that He gave us the ability to choose. We're not robots. You're not a robot; I'm not a robot. He didn't create robots. He doesn't make you forgive; He doesn't make us serve Him.
But He does say, "I set before you life and death; choose life that you and your descendants may live." You and I don't have to feel like doing what's right in order to do what's right. I don't have to feel like doing it; I don't have to think it's a good idea; I don't even have to want to. All I need to do is to make a decision and do what God has told me to do.
Why? Because I trust Him. I trust Him. I trust that He's good and that He's got my best interest in mind. When I know what He said about the way I should live, it honestly makes my decisions easier.
I don't have to figure out what's right and then wonder or worry about whether or not what I chose was really right, right? Yeah, I don't have to decide based on my feelings. Good Lord, if you and I did that, we'd be all over the place.
And unfortunately, some of you are here in that place right now where you're all over the place, and it's because you're allowing your feelings to dictate your decisions instead of what God has said. God is willing to help you; God's willing to help me every single second of the day.
But we have to ask ourselves this question: am I willing to do it His way?
Okay, the second step is we've got to depend on Him. We've got to first decide that that's what we're going to do, and then, as I said before, we've got to invite the Holy Spirit. We've got to depend on Him.
John 15:5 says, "I am the vine," Jesus says, "and you are the branches. If you stay joined to Me and I to you, you will produce plenty of fruit, but separated from Me, you won't be able to do anything."
So if all we do is offer up a prayer in the morning and then we walk our own way the rest of the day, separated from Him, His wisdom, His guidance, His whispering, His prompting, we won't be able to do anything.
Now, the third step is a two-step process. We've got to bless and pray for those who hurt us. Matthew 5:43 says, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you," this is Jesus speaking, "I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you."
I want to talk about praying first. Pray in this passage is in the Greek, is the word "proseuchomai." And I'm going to tell you what, when you actually sit down and really want to dig in—not just read it, not just read the word just to read the word that you check off your to-do list for the day—but you come with this hunger of wanting to know more, of wanting to go deeper, He will show you things way below the surface.
And that's where He wants us to get, is way below the surface. But this word in Greek, "proseuchomai," is a two-part word. "Pro" meaning towards or exchange, and "euchomai" meaning to wish. This word literally means to interact with the Lord by switching human wishes or ideas for His as He imparts faith.
Where did I get the "as He imparts faith"? Well, because "prayer" or "proseuchomai" is interconnected with the Greek word "pistis," which is faith in the New Testament. This is why it's so important that we pray. This is why He said this. He didn't say it just to say it, that you just need to offer up a cute, pretty, flowery prayer.
Oftentimes, I think that we can read that, and we can say, "Okay, well, God says that I'm supposed to pray for that person." And so then I start to do this: "Okay, Lord, I pray that You would show them what they did wrong, and I pray that You would change their thinking and change the ways that they wouldn't do it again."
Well, I mean, those are great things to pray. I mean, that's what we want, but that's not what He's saying here. No, He's saying you need to come to Me so that we can exchange your thoughts, your wishes on the situation, your ideas about your—I'm going to throw this in there too—your feelings about the situation, and I want to exchange them for Mine.
For Mine! Because, as Jennifer said earlier, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and His ways are higher than our ways. We've got to go to Him. That's part of renewing our mind every single day, and we've got to renew our mind sometimes every single second of the day because of things that come at us.
Praying for others may or may not change them, but it will always change you. Always! Always change you.
Now, what does it mean in this verse to bless? The word "bless" in verse 44 literally means to speak well of. So it's not that you go into prayer and you say, "Oh Lord, bless this person." Let's just be honest. When we're probably going to Him, we're like, "I bless him. I guess bless them. Just bless them."
What does that even mean? What does it mean to bless them? And what He's saying is that you're to speak well of. So that means that you and I, as followers of Christ, we don't get to talk bad about the person. We don't get to.
And I'm not standing up here saying that I'm some perfect person and that I don't struggle in that area at times myself because I'd be lying if I said that. But here's the thing: we've got the flesh and the spirit battling and warring against each other. So when someone hurts me, what do I want to do? What do you want to do?
I want to go and tell somebody. I want to go and tell a friend, "I can't believe this! This hurts so bad!" But what God wants us to do is He wants us to come to Him, come to Him and tell Him.
See, I heard someone say a few weeks ago when I was studying for this, and he was talking about how, you know, this war between the flesh and the spirit and everything within me wars against that speaking well of the person because we're so oriented with one another.
We've got to get to the place where we are more oriented with God. And will it sustain you that God knows what happened, that God sees your heart, that God empathizes with that hurt, and that God will comfort like only He can comfort? That's where we've got to get to.
I'm not there yet. Anybody else not there yet?
Listen to this quote by John Chrysostom. He was an early 5th-century Archbishop of Constantinople, and he wrote this: "What then are God's good deeds? He created us from nothing. He made the whole visible world for us. He made the heaven, the sea, the earth, the animals, plants, and seeds. I must be brief because of the infinite number of His works. And to us alone, of all that are on the earth, He breathed a living soul. He planted a garden for us. He gave us a helpmate and set us over all the brute species and crowned us with glory and honor. And yet, after all this, when humanity turned out ungrateful towards its benefactor, He thought us worthy of an even greater gift."
on Feb 11, 2024
